Yalo (19 page)

Marie's image was seared into the memories of the young men of the neighborhood as an oriental dancer swaying like a cobra to a musician's melodies without ever tiring. This went back to what Edward used to talk about in front of Abboudi's shop when he was drinking beer with the guys and talking about horse races.

She came carrying her son in her arms, and before she ate or drank, she put a little arak on her finger and let the baby suck on it. When he fell asleep, she put him in the bedroom. She started to drink and her body shone. Edward recounted everything. He said that in the beginning she refused to take off her mourning dress and he would sleep with her in her clothes. Then, little by little, she became less modest, “and finally when she took it all off, heavens, what a beauty, how white she was! She was wearing a red bodice and red panties, and she said that she was allergic to the color black. Some red and some white and bring on the dance! My God, how beautiful she was, as white as milk, white filtered through white, white on white that made me melt. Then it was over and believe me, I was sorry. I told her from the start that I couldn't. The fact is I was afraid. I had decided to remain a bachelor, but then I don't know what came over me, I said to myself, Why not? I'll marry her. But then later, no, I couldn't, it was surely
she who killed her husband. Who could handle a filly like that? I never saw anything like it. You just got near her and you felt the water coming out of her – a well, I swear to God, she had a bottomless well in her. Oh God, what could be better? But I was afraid. She told me that people were starting to talk, that is, I had to marry her. I told her I can't. I was afraid she'd kill me like she'd killed her husband. I asked her a hundred times how he died and a hundred times she didn't tell me. But no one saw the guy in the living room, my friends! They say he died in the living room after he asked for a drink of water and a cup of coffee. We ran over when we heard the noise and went in, and found ourselves in the bedroom, the deceased was in bed and covered with a white sheet. He was wearing a white shirt up top but no one noticed whether he was wearing anything below. Marie was standing beside the bed with her hair down. When the doctor got there he ordered us out of the room, and allowed only Marie to stay inside. After a minute the doctor appeared and said, ‘May he rest in peace, it was heart failure.' He was almost smiling. What did that mean? It meant, this was not about a cup of coffee. I asked her a hundred times, and she smiled like the doctor, and didn't answer. She sipped from the glass of arak and something like fire came out of her chest. What did it mean? It meant, right, he died because he couldn't stand so much beauty, so do you want me to marry her and die too?”

The talk attributed to the driver came after Marie and her son left for parts unknown. It was said that she went to live in the village of Choueifat, where she dwelled in a cottage near the Régie factory. But Edward's account led to many fantasies among Yalo and his friends.

Marie's appeal was her white complexion embellished with a beauty mark high on her neck. A woman of thirty, her white face sprinkled with freckles leading down toward her sternum, of medium height, her hair long and black, pulled back like a cap on her head, walking with her infant in her arms, and lust accompanying her all the way.

Yalo, Maron, and all the neighborhood guys continued to milk their desire for her even though she had disappeared from the neighborhood. Maron gushed white, and Yalo with the thorn that had grown between his thighs cried out her name and cried in pain.

With Marie, Yalo began to look at women differently. He was possessed by sex. When he saw a woman walking down the street, he imagined that she had just gotten out of bed; he saw her naked walking beside a man with blurry features and closed eyes. Closed eyes had sex with all the women in Beirut. His imagination took him away to distant places; he no longer distinguished between young and old women. In his imagination all the women were naked in bed with their eyes closed. Even his mother entered the picture. He saw Gaby, her hair bound up in a round
kokina
, sitting behind a sewing machine in her pale yellow blouse, with the tailor Elias al-Shami hovering around and having sex with her. Yalo saw nothing but a world crowded with desires. It was as if all women had become one woman with many heads. He would be walking down the street or playing with his friends, but everything was obliterated when he saw a woman, and nothing remained in front of his eyes but the color white.

When the white came into his hand, Yalo was alone, and it was not Marie, it was Elvira. On that spring morning, Yalo awoke to water washing his lower parts, with a foolish smile on his face. Years later, when Shirin asked him why he was smiling, he would answer that love made lovers foolish, and he asked her when she would be stricken with idiocy as he had been.

When had he told her that? And when had she told him that he made her laugh? When did he feel a violent love for her that tore apart his insides and made him have a milking session before he was to meet her so that he would come to her transparent, with his pure love?

Tossed here, isolated from the world, Yalo was confused as to how he should organize his memory. He was confused because things came to him
all at once and the images intermingled in his head, times overlapped in his consciousness, as if he were an old man. The
cohno
had once told him when he was trembling over his papers that the final stage of life was like a long sleep, and that the Syriac St. Ephraim had awoken from the sleep of death when he succeeded in transforming his body into solid, dry clay – like our ancestor Adam before God breathed a soul into him.

“How did they bury St. Ephraim?” Yalo asked.

“They broke him up. They could not bury him before breaking him up into small pieces, and that's how they lowered him into the grave.”

“. . .”

“That's how I am,” said his grandfather. “When life is over, a man becomes like clay, and can no longer distinguish between truth and illusion, or the past from the present. He becomes like a young child.”

His grandfather smiled as he told his grandson how the body of St. Ephraim had become like clay, and Yalo saw simplemindedness written on the face covered with white hair, and saw the clay taking over his grandfather's hands, which emerged from the folds of the black robe. Old age was written on his grandfather's hands like sunbaked clay. Dark spots, thin fingers, bones like an interior layer of clay, and the smell of earth. When his grandfather's rheumatism worsened and his hands and feet got stiff, Yalo was frightened, seeing his grandfather as if he were a clay statue, and he began to imagine himself breaking up the clay body in order to put it into the casket.

Yalo's nights began to be filled with visions of clay. He saw his grandfather in many different forms. He saw him as a huge corpse bloated with earth that the sun had leavened, then he saw him in small pieces arrayed on the bed. He saw himself with a huge hammer he used on the clay body to shatter it, with blood streaming down his hands and clothes.

Faced with Alexei, of whom nothing remained but his white bones and
ragged clothes, Yalo saw his grandfather's face as he grumbled at his daughter's insistence on feeding his grandson morsels of raw sheep's liver to cure him of the anemia he suffered from. His grandfather held his nose because of the smell of the blood overflowing from Yalo's lips. Yalo was unable to push back his mother's hands, which besieged his mouth with a piece of raw liver with green mint and white onion.

His grandfather left the table repeating his graveyard theory: “Why are you treating the boy that way, daughter? A man's stomach should not be a graveyard for dead animals. Man is the image of God. What is this savagery, killing animals and burying them in our bellies so that we become like walking tombs. A man becomes a big graveyard. His stomach is a grave and his head and eyes are the gravestones. Then when a man dies he is devoured by the graveyard inside of him. His belly becomes his graveyard. Saints' bodies do not decompose and worms don't invade them because they do not eat the flesh of the dead. What is man, a graveyard?”

His grandfather spoke of tombs, and Yalo imagined his belly as a tomb for animals, and wept at his mother's firm hand, which did not pity the little lamb whose raw liver had become a morsel she thrust into the mouth of her son, who was a weakling. She would trick her son by preparing bulgur with meat, telling him it was potato balls. Yalo lived for some time on this disguised food. That is what his mother assured him when he started to go to the Sennacherib Club to practice martial arts and bodybuilding and ate only meat and sought nothing in food but protein so that he might overcome his weakness and develop his muscles.

The war made Yalo forget bodybuilding, but it did not make him forget his grandfather's stories about bellies and graveyards, or his life with the Kurds and the sight of slaughtered animals hanging at the entrance to the house and the smell of blood. The mullah lifted his cloak off the ground
and stood with his feet apart to select chunks of meat he ate raw, with his womenfolk and children around him.

“I ate like them, pouncing on the slaughtered animal and dipping my hand in the blood. I was always hungry. The only thing that scared me was going hungry, I felt alone, a stranger among them. My brothers – his sons, that is – called me the son of the Christians and stole the food in front of me, so I was always afraid of dying of starvation. When I escaped, no, I didn't escape, my mother's brother came and offered to buy me, only my father, that is, the mullah, refused to sell me. He spat on the ground and said: “He is free to do as he likes.” And I don't remember anything else until I was with my uncle in Al-Qamishli. There I felt I had made a mistake, so I escaped to Beirut and worked as a layer of tile. Then I received the divine calling and became a
cohno
. One day, kneeling at the hands of the lord archbishop as he was blessing me, I saw my whole life pass before my eyes. Don't they say that at the moment of death a man sees his whole life rush by like a reel of film? I saw my life at the hands of the lord archbishop and I saw blood. I saw sheep and calves hanging in front of me and I began to weep. I felt blood dripping out of my eyes rather than tears. Everything tasted salty, and I even saw the calves crying. Before a calf is slaughtered it cries like a little child. I felt as if I were about to be slaughtered. I finished praying and remained kneeling where I was. I should have gone to the altar to take part in the mass, but I couldn't stand up. I felt as if my legs were frozen, so I stayed there kneeling and weeping. Then the archbishop took hold of me, God rest his soul, by my shoulder and called me, ‘Ephraim' – I had completely forgotten that they'd given me the name Ephraim, my name was actually Abel Abyad. And I said, ‘Who is Ephraim?' ‘Tell me what's wrong, my boy. Come, get up, your name has become Ephraim by the power of the Spirit. You must forget your old name. Spit on Satan and rise.' I got up,
and I decided that day to stop eating meat. My wife fooled me, the way your mother fooled you. I did not become the master of my fate until after your grandmother died, may she rest in peace. She'd mix the meat in with everything else, and tell me it was vegetarian, and I knew no better. But later I discovered, because after she died my body smell changed – the rancid smell was gone. I decided then to become like clay, to eat nothing but the plants of the earth, my basic food must be greens, of which the most important is what they call Arabs' bread, or mallow. Eat greens and that's all. How did you get like this, my boy? When you were young you were like the saint. Now you've become a beast and your belly is a graveyard.”

Alexei became a graveyard of his own, with nothing remaining of him but a set of bones and the ragged clothes around which gathered the sobs and exclamations of his horrified comrades.

Yalo saw himself as a tomb after the Alexei night, he saw his death in the form of shouts mingled with the claws that tore at his lower parts, and felt that death was a true mercy. The laughter of the officer who held the bamboo cane in his hand was like the echo of distant voices coming from beyond death. He tried to scream, but his voice came out as a feeble meow, then dizziness silenced him. There in silence he licked his excrement, unconsciously, as if consuming himself before sinking into the tomb.

That was the day Yalo confessed to everything.

What did he say? He no longer remembered, but he listened to his tremulous voice, knelt on the ground, and told the officer that he was ready to kiss his boots. He bent over the boots and kissed one. He did not see how the muscles in the officer's face tensed with pride and exaltedness. The officer was enjoying his triumph over this man prostrate before him, who had become a heap of shit and piss.

“You are shit,” said the officer. “Listen to me. I'm asking you. What are you?”

“. . .”

“Answer the question.”

“I'm shit,” said Yalo.

The officer's guffaws spread through the room filled with a nauseating smell, they were like the lashes of the whip that had rained on Yalo's back.

Yalo discovered that a man was capable of anything. That was what Madame Randa taught him. With her he discovered his body as separate parts for pleasure. She taught him how to kiss. No, the kiss was the first lesson Elvira had inculcated in him – Elvira who married Isa, the director of the Banca di Roma branch in Hamra, even though she loved Yalo. But the women of the war made him forget the taste of that kiss until Madame Randa came along and randified his lips.